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Author Information
 In the sixth grade, Tamora Pierce was encouraged by her father to start writing and she immediately got hooked. Once she discovered fantasy and science fiction, she tried to write the same kind of stories she read, only with teenaged girl heroines who were usually missing from the 1960s stories.
Before her junior year at the University of Pennsylvania where she studied psychology, Pierce rediscovered writing when she wrote her first original short story since tenth grade. She sold her first story a year later and then enrolled in a fiction writing course during her senior year. When her teacher suggested that she tackle a novel, her childhood ideas came back to her and she began her first sword and sorcery novel.
Pierce then worked as a housemother in an Idaho group home for teenaged girls, who loved hearing Alanna’s story from the in-progress quartet, Song of the Lioness. As Pierce continued to write and send out manuscripts, she moved to Manhattan to get her publishing career off the ground.
Pierce still lives in Manhattan with her husband, writer/filmmaker Tim, and their three cats, two parakeets, plus a floating population of rescued wildlife. She enjoys her hectic life as a full-time writer and she hopes that her books leave her readers with the feeling that they can achieve anything if they want it badly enough.
Tamora Pierce is a popular author of fantasy books for teenagers. In her latest quartet, Protector of the Small, readers follow heroine Kel as she rigorously trains for the knighthood.
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Author Talk
In 1983 Tamora Pierce published ALANNA: THE FIRST ADVENTURE, which was the first in a quartet entitled THE SONG OF THE LIONESS. Since then she's published many novels for young adults including another quartet, THE IMMORTALS, and four books in the popular PROTECTOR OF THE SMALL series. This fourth book, LADY KNIGHT, has just been released. You can learn more about Tamora Pierce and her all her books on http://www.tamora-pierce.com
Q&A WITH TAMORA PIERCE
Q: Your stories are full of wonderfully original and rich ideas. From what sources do you draw your ideas?
TP: Some I stumble across. Watching my mother and sister produce blankets from balls of yarn and crochet hooks, I thought of it as a kind of magic, and wondered what could be done with thread magic. Wrestling with my best friend's dove gave me the ideas for Kel's relationship with the baby griffin in SQUIRE. Pictures in magazines also give me ideas, as do stories in the news.
Other ideas come from my past obsessions. I wrote my first book, on a girl disguising her gender to serve as a page and squire to achieve her knighthood, without doing any research on medieval life. Except that I had --- back when I was very young, reading articles in encyclopedias because I liked finding out more about knights. I'd simply forgotten that I'd done all that reading, but when I began to write what became ALANNA: THE FIRST ADVENTURE, the information on knighthood was there without me even realizing it. My realization of that was the first time that I understood my old interests could give me ideas.
Another way I get ideas is from people. For instance, my Random House editor, Mallory Loehr, suggested that Kel be a commander, very different from my usual loner heroes. (I wasn't sure if I could write someone who works well with others!) It's due to input from my husband Tim that Lord Wyldon and all Stormwings are not capital-E Evil. The stories told by my dad, a Korean War veteran, and by the many Vietnam veterans I have known, shape many of the combat and camp situations of my books, the "Protector" books in particular.
Current events and history are also fertile ground for ideas. Shortly before I began work on "The Protector of the Small," the news was filled with the story of Shannon Faulkner and her long fight to be allowed to enter the Citadel, at that time an all-male military academy. The resistance she and the women who followed her the next year encountered informed a number of the situations in FIRST TEST and PAGE, when Kel not only knows that the training master is resistant to her presence, but also when a number of the boys haze her.
September 11 . . . on the 10th I had stopped work for the day right at the point when Kel's refugee camp is attacked. I had to write about that, and about the horrible result, as people risked their lives to enter the World Trade Center's rubble to find anyone alive. It took me two weeks to write the next twenty pages: I think they were the hardest of my life. They, and the entire book once I rewrote it, carry my thoughts and feelings about not only what happened here, in New York City, but what then took place in Afghanistan and what continues to take place all over the world.
The best way to prepare to have ideas when you need them is to listen to and encourage your obsessions. Find out all you can. All creative people --- not just writers! --- expose themselves to as much information, in as many forms, as possible, in the hopes that it will be useful down the road, or even right now. You never know what will spark something new!
There are a lot of people writing fantasy, and therefore having to come up with new creatures. How did you come up with the creatures in your books (basilisks, hurroks, Stormwings, etc.)? How do you make them differ from others and make them come alive?
As a kid, I read a lot of Greek, Roman and Norse myths. When I saw how goofy the medieval ideas of "fabulous beasts" looked, I started looking for creatures of my own that would make some kind of sense. The basilisk of medieval times was made up of a rooster's head, a goat's head and a snake's head on a goat body, with a snake's tail. I couldn't do anything with that. Fortunately, I had pictures of the Central American basilisk lizard --- they just needed to be a bit larger, talkative, and colored differently.
Others I made up. I've read so many scholarly books about myths and why they have the power they do that I could use those abstract ideas to help me shape the inhabitants of the Divine Realms. The Stormwings, for example. I began with harpies, but I never liked the fact that harpies are only female --- I wanted something for both sexes. I took the Stormwings' mission to despoil battlefield dead from an image in a movie, Ray Harryhausen's "Jason and the Argonauts." The harpies who ruin the king's dinner are so creepy and alien that the image of their attack stayed with me. (Knowing that they mess with bodies gave me the idea for their smell.) I also wanted my Stormwings to be clearly unnatural and therefore frightening, which is where the steel feathers and claws came in. It was my husband's idea to make them not entirely hateful.
Q: Your characters are so vibrant and full. How do you come up with characters and make them real?
TP: I often start with a real person --- if not someone I know, then an actor or actress I think would fit the part. I've been creating characters for so long that now, if I know what someone looks and sounds like, knowledge about the character's personality is right there in my head. As a result, I use a lot of photographs of people or performers. Of course, there always comes a point, as I'm working, when the character breaks away from the person I based her/him on to become her or his own self. That's how I know I'm doing it right. Some examples are characters like Alanna, based on my younger sister, the Emperor Mage Ozorne, based on rock musician Ozzy Osbourne, and Kel's friend Neal, based on actor Christian Slater. I even had a photo of him in the right clothes from "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" --- talk about a slider!
Q: The names of each character suits them so well. They are so colorful and yet they match their origins so well. Where do you get names for characters and places?
TP: I get character names from all kinds of sources. One warning: avoid names from telephone books --- if someone discovers their name in something you've written, they can sue. With that in mind:
* Baby name books. I own seventeen, each with its own blank paper jacket over the cover. (You do not want people to see you reading a baby name book. They give you all kinds of grief, wanting to know if you are expecting.) Since I write fantasy, most of my name books are about world culture names, starting with THE NEW AGE BABY NAME BOOK. This gives you a ready supply of names that are unusual to start with; often for my own use I'll fiddle with the spelling a tad, to make the name even more the property of my fantasy universe.
* Maps. When I'm really stuck, and I want a lot of names that sound like they all come from the same part of the world as the culture I based mine on, I get very detailed place maps. For example, I based the culture of the Saren and K'miri people in my Tortall books on Southeast Asia, so I found detailed maps of Laos and Cambodia and took parts of obscure place names for both surnames and place names in Saraine, where most of LIONESS RAMPANT is set. I don't use all of a place name, but part of it, and I make lists of possible names for future use.
* Language books. When I'm basing a culture on one in our world, I pick up phrase books and dictionaries for the cultures which are dominant in that part of the world. I'll try to find a word close to my meaning, and then I may fiddle with its spelling a little, to make sure someone familiar with that language doesn't recognize it and get jolted out of the fantasy universe I created.
* Ye Olde Notebook Trick. If you want to write anything, the notebook that fits in your bag or backpack and rests on your nightstand is your best friend. Mostly you'll use it for ideas, sentences and descriptions, but they are also good storehouses for the names you like when you stumble across them in everyday life.
Q: What does going on an author tour mean to you?
TP: It's a chance to get out and see places I might otherwise never go, do things I've never done, all material to add to my idea bank for some future time when I'm stuck. Touring in England led to me writing about cities in entirely new ways, visiting Vancouver and Seattle gave me the feel of places tucked in and on mountains. Far more important than getting sources for new ideas is the chance to meet my readers. Some of them I've known via mail and e-mail for years, and a tour makes it possible for us to meet in person for the first time or to meet again.
I also meet the readers I haven't been in touch with, people who tell me what they liked and what they didn't like, how they discovered my books, and people who have their own suggestions for what they'd like me to write next. They also give me ideas or reinforce my ideas. Long before I signed my first contract with Random House, I had asked fans on tour if my writing about another girl knight was a good idea or a "been-there-done-that" idea. The enthusiasm of their response made me summon up the confidence to try the idea on Random House.
And even if they don't give me ideas, they give me energy. Talking to readers, trading ideas and stories with them, trying out new readings on them, is a wonderful motivator. I take all that energy they give me so freely and come home to write more books, telling myself as I type a particularly tasty bit, "Oh, they are gonna "so" love this!"
(c) Copyright 2002, Tamora Pierce. All rights reserved.
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